Doctor...check, nurse... check, pharmacy...check, patients.........

To even try and begin explaining what’s going on here is incredibly difficult, our information changes by the minute and by the time I finish writing this everything will probably have changed again!

I’ll start with what I know for sure. We have been here for 5 days now and we have not seen any patients yet! Our camp where we are based in Gornja Radgona has had no refugees transiting through since the 25^th November. Information from local partners and governmental officials suggest that Slovenia is now acting primarily as a corridor for refugees to be transited directly through the country from the Croatian border straight into Austria. They are only stopping to be registered at the Croatian/Slovenian border in a town called Dobova. There are some actors (not Hollywood ones) providing healthcare at this point but informal reports from refugee networks suggest that there are still vast health needs and this is before people are being shuttled onto overcrowded trains.

Last Sunday the Turkish Prime Minister struck a deal with EU leaders dangling the carrot of possibility of entry into the EU, no restrictions on visas for Turkish nationals and 3bn euros in exchange for preventing refugees from travelling into Europe. Turkish authorities have since made raids at the coast of turkey and rounded up and apprehended 1300 people aiming to make the journey by boat across to Greece. These actions along with a worsening in the weather have led to a decline in the numbers of people arriving in Greece daily (from 5000/day to hundreds). Turkey is already home to 2 million refugees and has increasingly limited capacity to manage them let along new refugees arriving daily.

Last week a statement was issued by Serbia, Croatia, Slovenia & Macedonia stating that they will now only permit entry to refugees from Iraq, Syria and Afghanistan (I'll explain in my next post why this is horrendously illegal under international law). All other refugees will not be allowed entry and in order to control this, all countries mentioned are considering or in a process of building fences to “control” the entry of migrants. This policy has directly led to around 2500 people getting stuck at the camp in Idomeni on the Greek/Macedonian border as people of other nationalities are denied entry to Macedonia. The situation is becoming increasingly tense as refugees are protesting against the unfair ruling and protests and becoming more extreme, suicide attempts, hunger strikes and some young men sewed their mouths shut as part of the protest. The health needs are great and the camp is very exposed to the elements, as winter hits the needs of these people stuck here will escalate. There are also those putting their lives in the hands of smugglers as they attempt to gain entry into Macdeonia by walking on foot through dangerous mountain roads in freezing conditions.

The situation in Calais is also getting worse. Police seem to be mounting a much more brutal response to those still trying to cross each evening and tensions between lorry drivers and refugees are escalating. The MdM clinic there is seeing regular tear gas injuries, broken bones, dog bites and lacerations from people trying to cross the razor wire. Accidental fires are becoming commonplace in the jungle as desperate people try to stay warm. However, some good news for people in Calais, an emergency court ruling has been passed obliging the Calais officials to provide urgent access to plumbed drinking water, toilets, organising the rounding up of unaccompanied minors putting them under state protection and more organisation of the camp to allow access for emergency services. We’ll have to see how this is implemented and if it brings any relief to the people stuck there.

So what have we been up to whilst all this is going on?? Well firstly we’ve been feeling very frustrated that we are a completely functioning mobile medical clinic with no patients to treat despite there being such urgent needs across Europe. Second, we have been reorganising our stock and rationalised our mobile pharmacy which sounds like a small job but took a long time to make sure everything was where we could find it. 

 

Organised!

Titi proud of our new pharmacy

Third, we have been meeting with local actors to try and gain more information about the situation and predict if there is going to be a need for our clinic in Slovenia. We have heard that another exit point (Sentijl) may start to be used again to allow processing for people on the Austrian border. The Czech army is currently providing healthcare in this camp but they are leaving on the 10^th Dec so we could potentially take over the healthcare of this camp. This camp is not as well set up as Gorna Radgona and is just tents so it’ll be a completely different set up and we could spend the next week planning logistics, finding a new place to stay and moving the clinic and tent there.

We’ve been invited along with a lot of other actors and NGOs to a meeting next Monday to explain the work that we do and see how best the Slovenian NGO network thinks we can deployed. At this meeting we’ve been asked to run a small clinic for some “migrants” that are there. We don’t have details who these people are but we think they maybe vulnerable populations in Slovenia (maybe Romani people along with very few refugees from this current crisis who have claimed asylum here). We are also going on Thursday to meet with the minister of public health in the capital along with our regional coordinator to try and see if he can agree gainfully employ us!

There is vague talk about making a clinic or running some kind of medical service on the trains that are passing through but its very early days with that one and I have my reservations about how feasible it is but could be very cool! We’ve also been eating pizza and watching films so please don’t think I’m in any way hard done by. Titi our coordinator keeps telling us to enjoy the relaxation as we will need the energy once we start but I feel like a fraud sitting around in our lovely hotel waiting for news of refugees arriving but impotent to help anyone else.  

On the one hand, I’m really glad to be here and be involved in the coordination and planning of our clinic and its really pushed me to think in depth about how complicated these situations are. I feel like I’m learning a lot and exploring all sides of how a humanitarian response is created but the overwhelming feeling is just frustration about not being able to help in a tangible way. It’s incredibly difficult for MdM to plan its human resources and when we were deployed here there were 2-3000 people transiting daily through the camp and the need was overwhelming. Its amazing how quickly things change here and how volatile the situation is. Trying to predict anything is impossible as its an entire network of countries and how one behaves affects all the others in a chain. There’s also the worry that we know there is a need here because the team before us were seeing up to 200 people a day for medical consultations and if we leave to go somewhere more urgent that need will never have any chance of being met.

There seems to be a general feeling that the Balkan governments wants the refugees in and out their country as fast as possible and in organising those logistics, officials have forgotten these are people being transported not goods. We have no concrete idea about how things are on these trains but there is a real worry about the dehumanising processes being used as European governments try to move people as “efficiently” as possible. These people urgently need some humanity and watching this beautiful sunset in Slovenia tonight I have hope we will get a chance to provide that soon.